Publication of documents in electronic form can provide an effective avenue for distributing information to an audience. Unfortunately, managing distribution of a large number of documents for publication in electronic form is often a laborious task. A curator of such documents, for example, must maintain not only the documents themselves but also a manner in which the audience accesses such documents. Documents which are repeatedly updated and/or replaced require associated updating of the manner in which the audience accesses such documents. Any difficulty in maintaining such documents and such access, therefore, is quickly compounded by the number of documents being published.
A product manufacturer, for example, may choose to distribute product information to consumers in electronic form. As such, the product manufacturer may establish an Internet website which provides technical support features such as publication of product support documents for consumers. Thus, the product manufacturer can make a large number of product support documents readily available to consumers.
The product manufacturer, however, may produce multiple products within multiple product lines with multiple support documents being available for each product. If, for example, the product manufacturer has five product lines each including an average of five products and each of the products reference an average of 20 support documents, the product manufacturer must maintain approximately 500 documents. In addition, the product manufacturer must maintain the manner in which such documents are presented to and/or accessed by consumers. Thus, any links between the Internet website and the documents and grouping or listing of the documents must be maintained. Existing methods of establishing and maintaining such links and/or groupings or listings, such as hard coding of document links and manually tracking document links with a database or spreadsheet, are typically labor intensive and impractical for a large number of documents.
Accordingly, a need exists for efficiently managing grouping and/or categorization of a plurality of documents and distribution of one or more of the documents to an audience such that the documents can be updated or recategorized without affecting distribution aspects of the documents and, conversely, distribution aspects of the documents can be updated and/or reconfigured without the need for updating the documents.